How to get the VM Folders hierarchy with their managed object reference?

[jashanj0tsingh]

I am writing a wrapper around govmomi, and I want to query vCenter to return me the VM Folders and the vms under those folders.

I already got some insight from issue#1116 but I was wondering if there is a way to get the VM Folders in a way that can be marshalled into something like below instead of dealing with strings inside the InventoryPath property?

for ex,
{ "dir": { "name": "directory1", "vms": { "vm": { "name": "vm1", "reference": "vm-105" } } } }

this is what I have so far,

var dc = []string{"Datacenter"}
var ps = []string{"name", "vmFolder", "hostFolder"}

moRef, err := manager.CreateContainerView(ctx, client.ServiceContent.RootFolder, dc, true)

var datacenter mo.Datacenter

err = moRef.Retrieve(ctx, dc, ps, &datacenter)

I want to be able to get the object reference as well so that later in my code I can use it for a performance query, and to create query specs you require that reference.

I am able to get the type and value properties of VMFolder and HostFolder, but I am having difficulty to further extract children of those folders with their names, I also tried something with PropertyCollector but I didn't get far,

thanks.